Fixing Humanities Grad Programs

By Colleen Flaherty. Graduate education in the humanities is in crisis. Michael Bérubé, president of the Modern Language Association and director of the Institute for Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, acknowledged that it isn’t exactly news, but he wanted to say it anyway Thursday during a speech on the topic at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools.
“It’s just bad,” he said. “[It’s] like a seamless garment of crisis; pull on any one thread and the entire thing unravels.”
Although the troubles are easy to diagnose, prescribing a better future for humanities graduate students and Ph.D.s is much harder. Questions about attrition and time to degree raise questions about curriculums and size of programs, which in turn raise questions about the purpose of those programs and graduate career trajectories. Those questions then fall on the state of the academic job market. In short, Bérubé said, “There’s no way to talk about the future of education in the humanities without talking about everything else in the humanities.” Read more...